Building Kids' Citizenship through Community Engagement by Bob Coulter (review)

Abstract

Book Review: Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production… 135 Building Kids’ Citizenship through Community Engagement Bob Coulter (2018) New York: Peter Lang, 147 pages $51.00 (paperback); ISBN: 978-1433135187 In Building Kids’ Citizenship Through Community Engagement, Bob Coulter creates space for educators of all stripes to explore approaches to place-based education and citizen science projects that cultivate young people’s co-constructive roles in classrooms, schools, and communities. His book draws on the well of John Dewey’s works and offers a seminar on Deweyian thought and its implications in contemporary educational settings. Coulter reminds readers of a fundamental goal for education in the eyes of Dewey: developing people’s capacities to meaningfully engage with and improve the communities in which they live. Coulter directs the Litzsinger Road Ecology Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden, a role he fills after decades of service as a math and science teacher in a variety of educational environments, including public and private elementary schools, and extracurricular programs. The wealth and diversity of his teaching experiences buttress the arguments and practical examples in his book. Over the course of four chapters, Coulter reviews the benefits and challenges of place-based education for both teachers and students. In the first chapter, he outlines the educational context common in American schools that he revisits throughout the text: educational institutions, practices, and technologies have diminished opportunities to cultivate students’ intrinsic motivation for self-formation and service to one’s community. Coulter builds on Pasi Sahlberg’s (2012) critique of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) and recommends the Deweypromoted concept of bildung as a vaccination to protect current and future generations of teachers and learners from the viruses of corporate, profit-driven curriculum and standardized testing void of connection to local contexts and students’ needs. The goal of bildung, according to Coulter, is to foster democratic engagement through self-formation in a manner that enables people to “serve both themselves and their community as they grow, develop new skills, and find ways to critique and improve their communities” (p. 80). In the second chapter, Coulter addresses fundamental concepts in learning from Dewey’s perspective, including experience and growth. Here, Coulter argues for creating educational experiences within students’ communities in order to bridge life at school with life at home. In this way, the activities are substantive and meaningful for young people’s personal growth, rather than singular and siloed within the classroom context. In the third chapter, Coulter interrogates fundamental questions of when and how educators should incorporate digital technologies into curriculum. He argues for maintaining pedagogic judgement for when technology—broadly defined from calculators to geographic information systems computer software—serve more as a distraction than a tool servicing learning and community engagement. Via commentary on the work of David Gauntlett (2014) and others, Coulter operationalizes a framework for assessing digital educational tools, such as a low entry level for skills, a tool that Book Review: Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production… 136 grows with the person, and a belief in the value of creative play. The fourth chapter briefly recounts key arguments and literature supportive of moving from the GERM approach to the bildung approach. To conclude his book, Coulter reviews Scot Osterweil’s (2007) Four Freedoms of Play, such as freedom to fail, which he argues moves conceptualizations of young people as passive recipients of knowledge toward engaged actors in constructing knowledge and their own educational opportunities. In addition to drawing on the seminal works of Dewey, Coulter references recent empirical research from psychology, sociology, and other education-focused fields to support his claims about the fundamentals of learning and the state of education in the United States of America. Rather than offer new theoretical pathways or empirical evidence, the merit of Coulter’s book is in the inspirational and practical examples for how to cultivate place-based educational opportunities. The arguments for why these opportunities promote young people’s engagement with their community are well known in field of environmental education and found in range of relevant texts. Of note is Coulter’s reference to the work of Roger Hart (1997) and the ladder of children’s participation, which Coulter draws...